Chris Hughes, owner of Fat Cat Vapor Shop, former president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Smoke Free Alternatives Trade Association or SFATA, joins the podcast to to talk about the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s new deeming rules on vaping products and e-cigarettes.

We’ve written extensively about the bipartisan, awful, awfully mis-named Innovation and PATENT Acts. Bills which would undermine the ability of patent holders to protect their property from thieves. By making it exponentially more difficult for them to do the one thing they can to stop the thieves – sue them.

Congressional oversight of executive branch agencies is a key element of the checks and balances that prevent accumulation of too much power, as well as abuse of that power, in any one part of government. A review of two recent congressional oversight endeavors now being stymied by the Obama Administration underscores the often-overlooked importance of the oversight process. In both cases, lives are at stake.

Pennsylvania, one of the first colonies-turned-states to declare unalienable a person’s right to life, must act soon to avoid becoming one of the last states to secure for terminally ill patients the right to try to save their own lives.

The British Medical Journal published a study in June that examined the “effectiveness and safety of electronic cigarettes at 24 months.” Measuring the “sustained abstinence from tobacco cigarettes”, the study…

Legislators have long attempted to reduce the negative health impacts of smoking through taxes, bans, and regulations. Some have tried to extend these same policies to electronic cigarettes or “e-cigarettes,” even though they contain no tobacco and are substantially less harmful than traditional cigarettes. This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unveiled new regulations placing electronic cigarettes under an avalanche of new rules requiring that they be approved as a new type of tobacco product — effectively treating them like traditional cigarettes.

Public Health England last in August of 2015 became the first national government agency to endorse e-cigarettes as safer options for current smokers. Its report also dispelled several bogus anti-tobacco claims. Why is it that e-Cigarettes are seen as life-savers by the UK Government, but condemned by the US? Find out why by checking this recent article of Wednesday, April 13, 2016.

Cigarette smoking has become significantly less popular in the U.S. over the past decade, it still remains a public-health scourge. Smoking accounts for more than 480,000 deaths every year in this country, or about one of every five death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while an additional 16 million Americans live with a smoking-related disease. Clearly more needs to be done to get Americans to quit smoking.